by Martin Reftorr

Created on: June 15, 2008   Last Updated: June 16, 2008

Like many of her poems, "The Last Night that She Lived" contains poet Emily Dickinson's exploration of dying and human emotion. Rather than romanticizing death, however, Dickinson utilizes death as a simple process in human life. She achieves this by creating a tone progression in the speaker, beginning with excited anticipation and culminating in disappointed realization, through the use of alternating active and passive figurative language and structure patterns.

Dickinson primarily marks the shift of the speaker's tone with the presence of or lack of action. Early on, she creates an attitude of excitement and building anticipation by indicating the speaker's heightened sense of detail and the "italicized great light" which dawned in the near future. Further, the speaker's emotions toward the upcoming event (a death) are very active, involving a jealousy and continued walks in and out of the dying person's "final room". Here, Dickinson gives the reader an image of onlookers anxiously pacing back and forth through the room waiting for some action to occur. As the tone evolves into one of disappointment and realization, the speaker reflects more pedestrian emotions such as being "too jostled to speak". Ultimately, the disappointment is inherently connected to the lack of intensity surrounding the actual death, with minimal action such as "lightly bending" and "consenting". At the end, the speaker indicates a realization of needing to regulate the conceptual understanding of dying, but still, in line with the tone, does not actually do this and instead stays inactive. Dickinson creates a tone shift in the poem largely through the progression of images which reveal action to those which reveal the opposite.

She also achieves the tone shift by including various structural patterns and themes. Ironically, in the evolution of tone and action, Dickinson maintains the same syllable and rhythm pattern from line to line. This decision sets the stage for the conclusion of the play, in which the speaker realizes the need to find a new understanding of death. The consistent rhythm mirrors the realization that death doesn't change, yet people's reactions to it can in that death and the structure are both rather consistent, while the action undertaken by the speaker within the lines can vary (which mimics the speaker's conceptual grasp of dying). Chronologically organizing the poem also serves to help move along the shift in tone by allowing the tone before the death and after the death to be compared as a sequence. Dickinson effectively uses these structure patterns to emphasize the tone shift as it relates to the action in the poem.

In examining death and the human response, Emily Dickinson's poem involves a speaker who experiences an evolution of attitude from an excited anticipation of death to a disappointed realization regarding the true nature of it. She incorporates a progressive lack of action imagery and structural tactics in order to accomplish this.

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